The Yellow Princess is an album by American folk musician John Fahey, released in 1968. It was his second and last release on the Vanguard label.

History

The Yellow Princess was Fahey's second and last release on the Vanguard label. Denny Bruce, Fahey's manager, discussed the unwillingness of the label to provide a budget for additional musicians for Of Rivers and Religion with music critic Richie Unterberger, citing the reception of The Yellow Princess. "His deal was that he could record for Takoma 'experimental records,' but to try and make commercial recordings for Vanguard, with their approval of the budget. The Yellow Princess, which had other musicians on it, didn't sell,' etc." It was after this and prior to the recording of Of Rivers and Religion that Fahey was given his release from Vanguard.

The date of recording and release is disputed by various sources. The Fahey Files states it is believed to have been recorded the spring of 1968 and released that summer. Unterberger cites a 1969 release date in the Of Rivers and Religion reissue liner notes.

Fahey's original liner notes describe the genesis of the song "The Yellow Princess", which was based on the overture to the opera La Princesse Jaune (The Yellow Princess) by composer Camille Saint-Saëns. Fahey wrote: "I once managed to copy the main theme of a passage from "The Yellow Princess Overture"... This is a stabilized improvisation upon that passage. I began it in 1954 and completed it in December 1966, in Bastrop, La."

"The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee" is a musical collage done with the collaboration of Barry Hansen. The two had worked on sound collages on Fahey's prior Vanguard release, Requia. Fahey commented that "I didn't know how to mix things on tape recorders and make edits. Barry was more knowledgeable and intelligent than me."

Additional musicians Jay Ferguson and Mark Andes were members of the rock band Spirit. Kevin Kelley was a member of The Byrds for a brief period.

Reception

The Yellow Princess and its reissue has received consistently positive critical reviews. Record Collector called it "...a pleasant journey to take, rattling along with the odd surprising flourish to mark the way, a random piece of dissonance to keep you awake and, above all, a reassurance that you’re in safe hands." Critic Andrew Gaerig praised the reissue, claiming " is exemplary of Fahey’s knack for exploiting his limited premise. The Yellow Princess is a hallmark not because it revolutionized Fahey’s sound, displayed an improved technique, or broke him to a wider audience. Rather, it was the combination of a particularly deft melodic touch... and a growing tendency to expand his sonic palette... that marks The Yellow Princess as one of Fahey’s most consistent, and ultimately enlightening works." Gaerig also notes the three previously unreleased tracks added are mostly noteworthy for “Steel Guitar Medley”, writing "The length and variety of the extras solidify The Yellow Princess as a fine starting point for any Fahey virgin."

Critic Eugene Chadbourne, writing for Allmusic praised the recording sound especially, calling it "...among the best of his many releases; at the proper volume, the effect is as if one had taken up residency inside the sound hole of a giant acoustic guitar." He particularly singles out "View (East from the Top of the Riggs Road/B&O Trestle)" as one of Fahey's masterpieces, "... on a par with Charles Ives for musical Americana."

Mason Jones of Dusted magazine especially praised the album for the title track, "March! For Martin Luther King" as well as "View" and especially "The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee" as unexpected musique concrète. Tracy Rogers of Music Box, called it a "...experimental, innovative, and avant-garde... seminal, minor-key, blues-folk recording."

In his liner notes for The Return of the Repressed, Barry Hansen noted Fahey's playing on The Yellow Princess as "some of the most technically accomplished playing of John's career."Hansen, Barry. Liner notes: Return of the Repressed.

Reissues

*The Yellow Princess was reissued on CD by Vanguard in 2000, 2001, and 2004.

*The Yellow Princess was reissued on vinyl LP by Vanguard in 2008.

*All the tracks from The Yellow Princess plus four from Requia are available on The Essential John Fahey.

*All the tracks from The Yellow Princess were included in 1999 on the CD The Best of the Vanguard Years

Personnel

*John Fahey – guitar, sound effects

*Mark Andes – guitar, bass

*Jay Ferguson – organ, piano, keyboards

*Kevin Kelley – drums

*Barry Hansen – sound effects

Production notes:

*John Fahey – producer

*Barry Hansen – producer

*Sam Charters – executive producer

References

Category:1968 albums

Category:John Fahey albums

Artist/Band Information

John Fahey (February 28, 1939 – February 22, 2001) was an American fingerstyle guitarist and composer who pioneered the steel-string guitar as a solo instrument. His style has been greatly influential and has been described as the foundation of American Primitivism, a term borrowed from painting and referring mainly to the self-taught nature of the music and its minimalist style. Fahey borrowed from the folk and blues traditions in American roots music, having compiled many forgotten early recordings of music in these genres himself. He would later incorporate classical, Portuguese, Brazilian, and Indian music into his œuvre. Fahey wrote a largely apocryphal autobiography and was known for his coarseness, aloof demeanor and dry humour. He spent his latter years in poverty and poor health and died in 2001. In 2003, he was ranked 35th in Rolling Stone's "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".

Career

John Aloysius Fahey was born in Washington, DC into a musical household—both his parents played the piano. In 1945, the family moved to the Washington suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland to a house on New York Avenue that Fahey's father Al lived in until his death in 1994. On weekends, the family often attended performances of top country and bluegrass groups of the day, but it was hearing Bill Monroe's version of Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel No. 7" on the radio that ignited the young Fahey's passion for music.

In 1952, after being impressed by guitarist Frank Hovington, whom he met while on a fishing trip, he purchased his first guitar for $17 from the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. Along with his budding interest in guitar, Fahey was attracted to record collecting. While his tastes ran mainly in the bluegrass and country vein, Fahey discovered his love of early blues upon hearing Blind Willie Johnson's "Praise God I'm Satisfied" on a record-collecting trip to Baltimore with his friend and mentor, the musicologist Richard K. Spottswood. Much later, Fahey compared the experience to a religious conversion and remained a devout blues disciple until his death.

As his guitar playing and composing progressed, Fahey developed a style that blended the picking patterns he discovered on old blues 78s with the dissonance of contemporary classical composers he loved, such as Charles Ives and Béla Bartók. In 1958, Fahey made his first recordings. These were for his friend Joe Bussard's amateur Fonotone label. He recorded under the pseudonym Blind Thomas. Retrieved December 2009.

The following year, having no idea how to approach professional record companies and being convinced they would be uninterested, Fahey decided to issue his first album himself, using some cash saved from his gas station attendant job at Martin's Esso and some borrowed from an Episcopal priest. So Takoma Records was born, named in honor of his hometown. Retrieved February 2010. One hundred copies of this first album were pressed According to The Rolling Stone Record Guide, First Edition (1979), "there were only ninety-five copies of the record available for distribution." The Guide assigns the record 5 stars out of 5.. On one side of the album sleeve was the name "John Fahey" and on the other, "Blind Joe Death"—this latter was a humorous nickname given to him by his fellow blues fans. He attempted to sell these albums himself. Some he gave away, some he sneaked into thrift stores and blues sections of local record shops, and some he sent to folk music scholars, a few of whom were fooled into thinking that there really was a living old blues singer called Blind Joe Death. It took three years for Fahey to sell the remainder.

After graduating from American University with a degree in philosophy and religion, Fahey moved to California in 1963 to study philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. Arriving on campus, Fahey—ever the outsider—began to feel dissatisfied with the program's curriculum (he later suggested that studying philosophy had been a mistake and that what he had wanted to understand was really psychology) and was equally unimpressed with Berkeley's (hippie) music scene. Fahey loathed the polite Pete Seeger-inspired revivalists he found himself classed with. The following year, Fahey moved south to Los Angeles to join the folklore master's program at UCLA at the invitation of department head D.K. Wilgus. Fahey's UCLA master's thesis on the music of Charley Patton was later published. He completed it with the musicological assistance of his friend Alan Wilson, who shortly after became a member of Canned Heat.

During this period, Takoma Records was reborn. Fahey decided to track down Blues legend Bukka White by sending a postcard to Aberdeen, Mississippi (White had sung that Aberdeen was his hometown, and Mississippi John Hurt had been rediscovered using a similar method). When White responded, Fahey and ED Denson, a Washington, DC area friend who had also moved west, decided to travel to Memphis and record White. The recordings by White became the first non-Fahey Takoma release. Fahey also, finally, released a second album in late 1963, called Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes. To their surprise the Fahey release sold better than White's and Fahey had a career going. But still Fahey did not begin playing in public for another year.

His releases during the mid-1960s employed odd guitar tunings and sudden style shifts rooted firmly in the old time and blues stylings of the 1920s. But he was not simply a copyist, as compositions such as "When the Catfish is in Bloom" or "Stomping Tonight on the Pennsylvania/Alabama Border" demonstrate. Fahey described the latter piece as follows : "The opening chords are from the last movement of Vaughan Williams' Sixth Symphony. It goes from there to a Skip James motif. Following that it moves to a Gregorian chant, Dies Irae. It's the most scary one in the Episcopal hymn books, it's all about the day of judgment. Then it returns to the Vaughan Williams chords, followed by a blues run of undetermined origin, then back to Skip James and so forth." A hallmark of his classic releases was the inclusion of lengthy liner notes, parodying those found on blues releases. Typically, these were epic acts of self-mythologization, mixing personal biography, reverie, folklore, and myriad obscure blues and bluegrass references.

Later albums from the sixties, such as Requia and The Yellow Princess found Fahey making sound collages from such elements as Gamelan music, Tibetan chanting, animal and bird cries and singing bridges. In 1967, Fahey recorded with Red Crayola at the 1967 Berkeley Folk Festival, music that resurfaced on the 1998 Drag City reissue, The Red Krayola: Live 1967.

In addition to his own creative output, Fahey expanded the Takoma label, discovering fellow guitarists Leo Kottke, Robbie Basho and Peter Lang, as well as emerging pianist George Winston. Kottke's debut release on the label, 6- and 12-String Guitar, ultimately proved to be the most successful of the crop, selling more than 500,000 copies. Other artists with albums on the label included Mike Bloomfield, Rick Ruskin, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Maria Muldaur, Michael Gulezian and Canned Heat. In 1979, Fahey sold Takoma to Chrysalis Records. Jon Monday, who had been the General Manager of the label since 1970 was the only employee to go with the new company. Chrysalis eventually sold the rights to the albums, and Takoma was in limbo until bought by Fantasy Records in 1995.

Later years

By the mid-1970s, Fahey's output abated and he began to suffer from a drinking problem. He lost his home in the dissolution of his first marriage, remarried, divorced again, and moved to Salem, Oregon in 1981 to live with his third wife. In 1986, Fahey contracted Epstein-Barr syndrome, a long-lasting viral infection similar to chronic fatigue syndrome, which exacerbated his diabetes and other health issues. He continued to perform in and around the Salem area, as he was managed by friends David Finke and his wife Pam. The trio attempted to keep Fahey's career afloat by radio appearances and small venue performances. He broke up with his third wife and his life began to spiral downward. He made what appeared to be his last album in 1990.

Although he won his five-year battle with Epstein-Barr, Fahey spent much of the early 1990s living in poverty, mostly in cheap motels. Gigs had dried up, due to his health problems. He paid his rent by pawning his guitars and reselling rare records he found in thrift stores.

Following a 1994 entry on Fahey in Spin magazine's spin-off Alternative Record Guide publication, Fahey learned that he now had a whole new audience, which included alternative US bands Sonic Youth and Cul de Sac, British comedian and writer Stewart Lee and the avant-garde musician Jim O'Rourke. Byron Coley published a large article called "The Persecutions and Resurrections of Blind Joe Death" (also in Spin magazine) and at the same time a two-cd retrospective called The Return of the Repressed all combined to kick-start Fahey's career. Suddenly new releases started to appear in rapid succession, in parallel to the reissue of all the early Takoma releases by Fantasy Records.

Jim O'Rourke went on to produce a Fahey album, 1997's Womblife, while in the same year Fahey recorded an album with Cul de Sac, The Epiphany of Glenn Jones (Glenn Jones is the lead guitarist of Cul de Sac). This late flowering showed Fahey had changed. Gone were the melodic dreaminess and folk-based meditations of the 60s and 70s, which Fahey himself characteristically denounced as "cosmic sentimentalism". In characteristically witty fashion, he once said of his style: "How can I be a folk? I'm from the suburbs you know." Now his music was harsh, grating, and confrontational.

At the same time as he was delving into more experimental electric music, Fahey's passion for traditional roots music did not subside. After coming into some money upon the death of his father in 1995, Fahey used the inheritance to form another label, Revenant Records, to focus on reissuing obscure recordings of early blues, old-time music, and anything else Fahey took a fancy to. In 1997, the label issued its first crop of releases, including albums by artists such as British guitarist Derek Bailey, American pianist Cecil Taylor, guitarist Jim O'Rourke, bluegrass pioneers the Stanley Brothers, old-time banjo legend Dock Boggs, Rick Bishop of Sun City Girls, and slide guitarist Jenks "Tex" Carman. Revenant's most famous release would become Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton, a seven-disc retrospective of Charley Patton and his contemporaries, which won three Grammy awards in 2003. Fahey himself won only one Grammy in 1997 for his contributions to the liner notes for Revenant's Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 4

On May 23, 1998, Fahey (guitar) performed an improvised experimental piece on the WNUR-FM Airplay show in Evanston, Illinois in collaboration with Jim O'Rourke (electronics, live-mixing). Later that evening, he gave a solo guitar performance at Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park. In the summer of 1999, Fahey returned to WNUR to read from the manuscript for what would become How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life—the working title at that time was Spank. An interview with Fahey by WNUR's Joe Cannon followed the reading. Fahey appeared to have found new vitality through his writing as well as his now more experimental and improvised compositions.

Fahey performed in Europe in Autumn 1999, including a show at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London in September.

In 2000, the American record label Drag City published a volume of Fahey's esoteric autobiogaphical short stories, How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, edited by Damian Rogers with an introduction by O'Rourke.

In February 2001, just a few days before what would have been his 62nd birthday, John Fahey died at Salem Hospital after undergoing a sextuple bypass operation.

In 2006, five years after his death, no fewer than four John Fahey tribute albums were released as a testament to his reputation as a "giant of 20th century American music" (Byron Coley).

Documentaries

Starting work in 2007, Washington D.C. filmmaker Marc Minsker produced a 30-minute documentary on the life of John Fahey entitled "John Fahey: The Legacy of Blind Joe Death." It chronicles his humble beginnings in Takoma Park, Maryland, through his success as a guitarist and record producer in California, follows him through his dark days in Salem, Oregon, and ends with commentary on his contributions to American music. The film was accepted into the Takoma Park Film Festival and on Friday, May 7, 2010, premiered at the Takoma Park, Maryland Community Center, accompanied by a live performance and discussion with Fahey's friend, guitarist Peter Lang.The Brightwoodian. http

A full length, feature documentary is currently underway by James Cullingham and his Canadian film house, Tamarack Productions entitled In Search of Blind Joe Death—The Saga of John Fahey.

Discography

Written works

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References